08/01/2026

Everything that John writes in his letters and Gospel is the result of his lifetime experience. 

He is "The Theologian" not because of study and applied intelligence but because he was chosen by Jesus to spend three years of his life with "Incarnate Son". 

I cannot begin to grasp the wonder it was for all those who "followed" the Lord as he made his way around Palestine. We know so little about the passage of that time when this planet was filled with the glory of eternity. Mary and Joseph were the first humans to know God. 

At first, he was for them the helpless human "babe in the manger" whom they had to protect with their human love. Mary and Joseph had known from the moment of the "Annunciation" that even with the embryonic Jesus there was "something greater here" and the awe with which thy must have witnessed his "normal" childhood development and the love with which he overwhelmed them as "Mum and Dad" is comprehensible only by IAMFATHERSONHOLYSPIRIT who himself is LOVE.

We can be sure that John spent only three years of his life being formed in the "way of Love" but for his final maybe fifty years he cared for Our Lady as he grew in understanding faith and learned that his living/dying/ resurrected friend can only be followed by Love.

With John, however, there is also "something greater here" we know him as a Galilean fisherman, a follower of the Lord, the guardian of the widowed and childless Mary, the Evangelist and teacher, the Elder of  Ephesus but he is also the Visionary of the Apocalypse and thus somehow belongs directly to God and beyond all human understanding.